


Never Truly Gone

by Sparcina



Series: How Frostiron Could Have Started [24]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, Banter, Confessions, Denial, Humor and sex, Less tags so no spoilers, M/M, Pining, Post-Endgame, clash of egos
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-30
Updated: 2019-04-30
Packaged: 2020-02-10 05:02:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,295
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18653434
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sparcina/pseuds/Sparcina
Summary: Tony and Loki are stuck together... somewhere.Appearances are deceiving.





	Never Truly Gone

**Author's Note:**

> Because obviously, I don't agree with *some* parts of Endgame.
> 
> A light fix-it <3

The gauntlet ravaged his body. The stones consumed it. It was his mind which fought the longest the inevitable pull of death.

As the world faded to nothingness around him, Tony felt curiously at pace. He felt… relieved that life would triumph, that the spiderling would live on, that all of his friends would persist in a world freed of a power too lethal to wield by any being, for any reason.

He felt content. He didn’t believe in destiny, but this end was fitting for someone like him, who’d spent most of his short life spiraling in destruction, only to try and make amends at the very end.

Time seemed to pause, as if to acknowledge his bout of selfless courage. His ego was coming along for the ride, it seemed. Was death always so peaceful? he mused as nothingness itself lost its consistence, as reality seemed to shrink onto itself and time slowly disintegrated like a mirage finally fading away. Somehow, he doubted he would be able to repeat the experience, even for science’s sake.

Peace. Peace, at last. He felt so light-

“Oh no you don’t!” a voice snarled at him, no, _through_ him.

He was already dissolving as a set of seemingly endless claws put him back together, mind, body and all.

And _yanked_.

He thought he screamed, but it must be nothing more than a last human notion drifting out into the void.

*

 _Stark_.

A word. Five… letters. They engulfed him, a cocoon to the non-being that he was, floating in… something.

_Stark, wake up!_

Why did it feel so familiar? Familiarity shouldn’t exist in a place like this. Which prompted the question: where _was_ he?

_Stark, WAKE UP!_

*

The first thing he saw when he jerked up awake was fury. Furious green eyes, a furious scowl, a faint tremor –fury, in another shape– in the hands that shook him with vigor.

He felt pain. Great pain. He also felt very, _very_ much alive.

All the more so when a few more neurons deigned to connect and he realized that the person shaking him should be dead, too.

Oh, well.

“Stark!”

Loki slapped him like he meant to split his face open. The stinging sensation across his cheeks began to make sense. The general sensation that he’d been run over by a few trucks… Less so.

And then he remembered Thanos. And the gauntlet.

The stones.

Wielding a strength he’d thought forever lost, he took hold of a pair of bony wrists and wrestled Loki to the ground. Either gods held no more power than mortals here, or Loki was as weak as he appeared; either way, Tony needed only a few moments to pin Loki’s shoulders to the rock (darkness, hard ground, the sound of still water; a cavern?) and lean into him with a thousand questions on the tip of his tongue.

“Tell me what’s going on.”

“We’re dead,” Loki replied with only a sliver of his former fury left. “Is it not obvious, Stark?”

Tony frowned. “I don’t feel dead.”

“Not in Helheim, you would not.”

“Your daughter’s realm,” Tony mused aloud, because he might as well roll with it. As far as he was concerned, he _was_ dead, Loki _was_ dead, so the god of lies must be saying the truth for once: Occam’s razor.

Loki, however, made his best impression of a disappointed teacher. “You vastly overestimate the accuracy of Midgard’s myths.”

“Then you’re not secretly a-”

“Perish that thought,” Loki cut in, voice icier than a blizzard in the middle of summer.

“You don’t even know what I’m going to say!”

“I know _you,_ Stark.”

“Do you really?”

*

Helheim was, for lack of a better world, a pretty decent resting place for the wicked. Once the initial pain from his departure from the living world dimmed (Hel-not-Loki’s-daughter’s-explanation), Tony even began to enjoy the place. He wasn’t overly fond of the cavern Loki had elected as a lair, but the landscape outside, a majestic stretch of land covered in pale grass and tall mountains tipped with black snow in the distance, appealed to the aesthete in him.

Loki wasn’t precisely bad company. Tony wasn’t sure _why_ the god stayed around, and even less certain why _he_ wasn’t bothered more by that fact. They talked–well, argued, day and night, or night after night, whatever amounted to time in this place. But they spoke. And Tony hated silence; it reminded him too much of Titan, and of Afghanistan.

Loki was dead, sure, but he was amusing, in a I-hate-you kind of way. And Tony was dead, too. Not that it shocked him much. Tony did dead well. He did dead fabulously, even. The people he’d loved in life were safe, the universe was rid of Thanos, the stones had been destroyed, and there was no war to wage, no pile of contracts to sign, no one who could threaten him… no nightmares either.

He _rocked_ death.

“You are doing it again, Stark.”

Tony didn’t bother looking up from his piece of rock. Helheim was _fascinating._ “What am I doing again?”

“Smiling to yourself.”

“No penny for my thoughts?” He spared a glance for Loki then, and was glad he’d done it: Loki too was doing it again. The scowl thing.

“You’re not worth that much, Stark.”

Tony’s smile widened.

*

Loki was a pain and the ass, but he was far from boring. They spoke of many things, traded science for magic and an equal number of vicious insults. They also fought, physically, even though they didn’t need to burn the energy they never needed from sustenance that didn’t exist. In this realm so far from home, Tony discovered that he could hold his own against a god and found great pleasure in knocking Loki’s off his feet, relished the way that lithe body writhed under his as Loki fought for control. Loki had a way to ensure his bites hurt, but Tony didn’t mind too much, not when those duels of sort filled him with so much… satisfaction.

Besides, Loki’s tongue loosened ever so slightly after a fight. And magic really was interesting, no matter what Tony said in response to Loki’s haunting stance on science.

*

“Tell me, where was I supposed to end up after the stones killed me?”

Loki didn’t reply. Tony didn’t expect him to. It must be the hundredth time he’d come up with a version of the same question, and Loki didn’t appear any closer to offer an answer.

That was all right, Tony thought as his heart, or the dead-but-not-quite equivalent skipped a beat. He was pretty sure he already knew.

*

Loki was very fond of an Asgardian game of strategy, a fancy hybrid between chess and Assassin’s Creed. Tony lost two thirds of the time, but Loki’s sour expression every time Tony won a round was well worth the constant stabs to his ectoplasmic ego.

Tony waited until they were at a tie one day to speak up. “I wasn’t supposed to end up in Helheim, was I?”

Loki dropped the tiny rock pawn he’d been on his way to move. “You annoy me very much, Stark.”

Tony’s heart did that little backward dance again.

*

“Why did you take me here?”

“To play _svar_.”

“No, truly, Loki.” Tony watched Loki’s lips as he spoke. He’d never noticed the sensual curve of Loki’s lips before (or maybe once, in the penthouse when he’d offered his enemy a drink, but that was so long ago), and he wondered why. Those were beautiful lips. Loki had a very kissable mouth.

He felt anger surge through him like a protective shield and embraced it with all his might.

“Am I really that interesting, or are you so alone here that you were desperate for any form of entertainment?”

Those were not the words he’d intended, but suddenly he was aching for a fight, and the anger gleaming in Loki’s emerald eyes mirrored his own so faithfully it seemed a shame not to feed it, not to drink in the gorgeous twist of Loki’s lips as the god snarled at him, knocking the _svar_ board off their makeshift rock table.

“The only thing you will ever inspire me is _contempt_!”

*

They didn’t see one another for a while.

Tony wasn’t sure what a while stood for in this wretched place he no longer found peaceful, and whenever he slept, he dreamt of green glass the likes of which he would never see again.

And he always woke up with the scorching heat of Loki’s anger branded behind his eyelids.

*

He didn’t like to call it ‘active avoidance’, but that was what Pepper would have said.

God, he missed her. She’d been a good friend right until the end. They were never meant to work together as a couple, but they’d been splendid accomplices.

How come he missed Loki more?

He hated his life. Or his death. Whatever.

*

“Is this what contempt- _ah!_ feels likes, Loki?”

Their first kiss had been a brutal reckoning, all teeth and tongue and angry whimpers. Tony didn’t bleed in Helheim, probably didn’t even have blood coursing in his veins, but still he felt the rush of something in his ears, and the sensation of heating up wonderfully from the insides out.

Loki’s fingers sank in his shoulders, tearing through the loose-fitting shirt that apparently was allotted to the new residents of Hel’s home.

“I hate you.”

Tony nibbled at Loki’s lower lip, inhaling the faint scent of the god’s rage. The fact that senses weren’t wired like that didn’t make the sensation any less convincing, any less real. “I make you feel alive where everything else feels bleak, just like you light this whole place up for me,” he said in a rush, skillfully forcing Loki to face the truth while he bared his own throat (metaphorically), for the bite of rejection that might come. “And there’s no other place for the both of us to exist on the same plane. It’s here, in Helheim, or nowhere.” He licked his lips as the green of Loki’s eyes seemed to spread far beyond the normal light spectrum. His heart leaped into his throat. “That’s the truth, and no lie of you will convince me otherwise.”

“I hate you,” Loki repeated after a moment of tense silence, but the words sounded softer, as if others lay underneath, coming into their true meaning with every breath vibrating through the god’s chest.

Their lips met again. Tony’s hands found their way under Loki’s tunic, and soon enough there was nothing but warmth between their bodies, around their two forms moving frantically against each other. Tony felt neither cold nor heat in Helheim, but Loki must have found a way around the rules of this place, because the first finger he pushed into him felt deliciously cool.

“What happened to you… _fuck,_ yes, just like that- to your grand plans of conquest?”

Loki pressed a second digit in and curled both fingers just so, grazing Tony’s prostate. Fire pooled low in Tony’s belly like a promise.

“I was mad.” Loki mouthed at his jaw. “I made poor choices.”

Tony gasped and snapped his hips faster in Loki’s lap. If he’d still been mortal, he might have blushed under the intense scrutiny of Loki’s heavy-lidded eyes. “I _am_ mad,” he panted.

“Because you let me touch you so?”

When Tony failed to reply in a timely fashion, Loki pulled out his fingers roughly. Tony pushed Loki onto his back with a growl and impaled himself on the god’s still hard cock. The lack of pain made it fairly easy to take him all the way down. The pleasure humming on both sides of his skin made it even easier to set a brutal, _glorious_ pace that punched whatever passed for air on this realm straight out of his lungs.

“Because I- don’t- want you…” he gritted his teeth, but the words came out anyway, “… to ever leave.”

Loki reversed their positions in a flurry of motions. His grip on the back of Tony’s thighs was strong as he plunged back into him, one harsh thrust after the other, and yet his touch felt so light it was almost reverent. Tony arched into the caress, drank in the cool lines Loki drew on the side of his neck mimicking a collar–a tentative claim.

“You do not bore me.” His voice was getting ragged, but his eyes never left Tony, his hands never stopped mapping the bare throat at his fingertips. “And I hate you because-” Fear crossed his eyes, brief but potent, an echo of what Tony remembered of his own life. “Because you never truly left my mind.”

Tony fisted a hand in Loki’s dark man and brought the god down for a dirty, thorough kiss as his climax tore through him. He was _dead_ ; such pleasure as the one he was experiencing shouldn’t be possible, but then many things didn’t make sense here, now.

Many wonderful things.  

Such as the god of surprises and insecurities wrapping himself around the mortal he’d saved to savor his post-orgasm lethargy.

“I’m glad you caught me,” Tony breathed in his ear, and grazed the lobe with just a hint of teeth.

With a groan, Loki tightened his hold on him. “You are ridiculously easy to trick into risking your life.”

“I’ll have you know that you’re refereeing to a _master plan_ , the greatest plan ever designed to kill the most powerful asshole to ever walk _my_ home, so-”

Loki’s mouth on his was an interestingly sexy way to be shut up.

So what if death suited him better with Loki around? He’d certainly earned that much.

Besides, was it really death, when he felt so very alive?


End file.
